We were delighted to participate in the first annual Cleveland Humanities Festival, in partnership with the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Supported by Ohio Humanities, the Festival hosted speakers and events around the city over a two-week period in early April. Linked by the theme “Remembering War,” the Festival sought to “engage the public in addressing some of society’s most challenging issues and pressing concerns” in partnership with the region’s major museums, educational institutions, and arts organizations. For us, the Festival provided an opportunity to bring Books@Work beyond the workplace, and use diverse narrative representations of life experience to challenge assumptions and appreciate the memories, stories, and courage of others.

How well do you know the person who sits next to you at work? What about the woman on the next floor, or down the hall? We are busy, and it’s all too easy to bring only a portion of ourselves to work, and to expect no more than a limited view into the lives of others.

And that’s a problem because, when we fail to recognize people in all their complexity or be recognized in turn, we create openings for misunderstanding and stress.

Man is a storytelling animal—we tell stories to preserve our past, record our legacy, and to teach our children. And we have done so in writing at least since the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BC). By using high quality stories about the human condition, Books@Work gives our participants a lens through which to examine the whole of human behavior, in ways that provide for rich and relevant conversations. We know that when we read narrative literature, we identify with characters and reflect on their relationships. We see ourselves in the stories of others and we share our stories.

This is why we don’t read business or self-help books: they tell people how to behave rather than provide an opportunity to explore and learn about themselves and each other.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, YesWare’s VP of Product, Jake Lavirne, asserts, “An environment of discomfort contributes to creativity by breaking people out of their normal thought patterns, encouraging original thinking and risk-taking.” Interestingly, an effective Books@Work seminar does just that—by creating opportunities to discuss provocative narratives, it pushes participants to challenge their own assumptions and reconsider their beliefs and their routines. Time and again, participants tell us that they come away seeing the world and themselves anew, able to take a step back from their daily lives to consider what those daily lives might really mean. In a recent Books@Work seminar, Professor Ryan Honomichl (whose work has been previously featured on The Notebook) led a seminar with a group of participants in a distribution center near Cleveland on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Reading and discussing Ishiguro’s haunting novel permitted them to cultivate “creative discomfort”—together.

Talking about literature helps us develop complex skills such as “critical analysis”: the ability to see beneath the surface, to reason through the meaning of details, and to situate the object of analysis within a larger context. It enables vital, careful thinking about texts, yes, but also about people, organizations, experiences. We all become better employees and co-workers, friends and citizens, mothers and fathers, when we improve and refine our ability to understand what’s around us through observation and thoughtful analysis.

What would you read if you were stuck on the proverbial desert island? What would make you laugh? What would sustain you? What speaks to your experience and reminds you who you are? Program and Curriculum Director Jessica Isaac lists her picks.

Recently, Program and Curriculum Director Jessica Isaac sat down with a group of SUNY-Fredonia professors to talk about their experience with Books@Work. What she learned surprised her. Without the teaching objectives they are required to use in the classroom, these faculty felt adrift, even nervous–at the same time, they were invigorated. Many working in education complain that we live in an age of overassessment. They rarely talk about how assessment can be comforting and comfortable. But is comfort really the mark of a quality educational experience?

In which we welcome our new Curriculum and Program Director, Jessica Isaac, to The Notebook and the Books@Work team. As Jessica writes of her passion for literature and culture: “Pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in English satisfied my hunger for greater understanding about language and texts and their relationship to culture, but I am happiest when I am sharing that knowledge with others… with people who have felt excluded from the conversation, who haven’t had the time or money or invitation to have discussions about meaning and experiences of awe and delight. And what always happens when I have those conversations is that I see what I have learned completely differently.” How lucky we are to have Jessica on the team – help us welcome her!